Why people are (mostly) joking about eating Tide Pods

You shouldn’t eat Tide Pods, despite the memes. But it’s not weird to want to.

Planet Earth is brimming with millions of different objects. But in this young year, there is perhaps no single item that has moved the dangerous desires of the human spirit as much as the brightly hued laundry detergent capsules known as Tide Pods.

One of several similar products on the market, Tide Pods are described by their maker as “small but powerful” alternatives to traditional laundry detergent that qualify as “more than just a liquid in a pouch.” These pods, Tide seems to promise, can revolutionize the way we wash life’s indignities out of our clothes.

Squishy little soap nuggets, I guess, are someone’s vision of the future of doing laundry. Each small pouch contains brightly colored liquid, and if you take a sniff, you’ll observe notes of a floral, chemical-scented bubble bath. Comparisons between the pods and pieces of candy abound.

But Tide Pods are also predictably poisonous to the human body — filled, as they are, with concentrated laundry detergent — and thus are not intended for consumption.

Tide’s reliance on the powers of poison to help us enhance the brightness of our clothing isn’t surprising or abnormal. It should go without saying that laundry soap isn’t meant to be eaten, including Tide Pods. Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped many people from wanting to bite into one.